At one point in my very early college career I can remember asking my adviser, after reading Nayra Atiya’s Khul-Khaal, how would you ever determine a woman’s virginity if women weren’t born with a hymen? I don’t ever recall sidi giving me an answer to that particular question (I’m fairly sure that was one of those moments where he used ’selective reading skills’), but that question has always kind of nagged at me more than any other throughout my entire career (however short it has been thus far) in Muslim women’s studies. I have consistently returned to the issue of honor and sex in Islam. I’m not sure that it’s some weird reaction to having spent the first 23 years of my life in Puritanical New England, a Boston baby or just some kind of morbid fascination, some kind of vestige of my mother’s Bohemian blood (the land of bone churches and witches). But really, what would we as women do as a gender, as a sex if we had nothing to “tag” us as virgins?
According to a recent report in Britain by the NHS states that 24 women have had hymen reconstruction surgeries done between 2005-06. The majority of these women were Muslim.
For the majority of women, the hymen is fragile, elastic, it doesn’t do a whole lot except exist.
43% of women actually bleed when they first have intercourse. That means that 57% of women don’t bleed at all, which translates to a little more than half.
So women are having their hymens put back together because they’ve broken taboos, but are still living in traditional families and some women who aren’t even part of the culture are having them put back together just because, which I find equally terrifying.
Maybe someone can explain this to me, because in all of my trolling around, I’ve never actually heard the justification for the “proof” of virginity. Nothing ever cited or shown to me in the Shari’a or in a hadith or anywhere, just this vague authoritarian, “Well, it is, because it is…” This kind of vague insanity regarding women’s sexuality that plagues all three of the monotheisms. I’m almost surprised that we don’t see this kind of spike in Judaism and Christianity, although I’m sure its more in a post-marriage virginity renewing as opposed to a pre-marriage one… (wow, that was possibly the most horrifying thought I’ve had to conceive in a very long time.)
Theologically speaking, if God intended for women to have hymens so that we would be marked as virgins, would we have evolved to such a point where more than half of us would have no indicator of our virginity? Have we devolved in pace with the rise in promiscuity? This is the ridiculous part of this whole hymen issue, as this is such a new concept. Discussing sex in an open forum: sex, hymens, virginity, all of it—before the latter half of the 20th century, no one would have ever dreamed of discussing it. So how do we even know?
The other night my father was watching The Nativity and the Virgin Mary gives birth of course to Jesus through a miraculous conception. Her father tells her that she can be stoned. They tell Joseph, her betrothed that he can have her stoned, that he does not have to accept her as his bride, but even before God speaks to him, Joseph refuses. Here is a woman, Mary/Maryam/Miriam who plays such an important role in Islam and Christianity, who God entrusts with a tremendous responsibility, and her husband relies on instinct and his faith in Mary and in God as opposed to social, cultural, and legal pressures. So then what’s up with the hymens???
When you marry, do you trust your wife, God, love? Or do you trust a flimsy membrane that just may or may not break apart? Why should some quirk of biology be where my value as a woman rests?
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